Showing posts about Gigs

27|06|2012

Since 2008 Jan Jelinek has been releasing
recordings from the archives of an electronic ‘outsider’ musician,
Ursula Bogner. Born in 1949 and employed as a
pharmacist for Schering, she devoted her leisure time to exploring
electronic sound, constructing a home studio, attending workshops
and building up a body of tape and synthesiser pieces that
reverberate with a ghostly, eerie intimacy.

Except, of course, she probably didn’t – Bogner is widely
believed to be one of Jelinek’s various musical personae, despite
his carefully constructed story of a chance meeting with her son
followed by the donation of an archive of reel-to-reel recordings,
photos and writings. After the first Bogner release in 2008 – a
compilation of fragmentary works dated ‘1969-88’ – another, more
fully realised album, Sonne = Blackbox, followed in 2011.
This release took the tale further, coming with extensive
documentation of Bogner’s research into esoteric areas such as
space travel and Wilhelm Reich’s theories of ‘orgonomy’. More
recently, Jelinek has taken his discovery out live, with
performances in which he and Andrew Pekler interpret Bogner’s
compositions.

‘Andrew Pekler & Jan Jelinek play Ursula Bogner’ was on my
list of must-sees at Mutek festival in
Montreal a few weeks ago. Sonically, the Bogner releases, with
their gently unearthly analogue miniatures, ticked many of my
boxes, whoever the man or woman making the music was. I’d no
problem with being Jelinek’s target audience conceptually, either.
It seemed pretty clear that he intended to comment on the ongoing
fascination with unearthing marginal figures from electronic
music’s past, an archival itch that, four years after the first
Bogner release, seems no closer to being scratched. That he chose a
female musician was significant. Composers like Daphne Oram, Laurie
Spiegel, Eliane Radigue and Ruth White are not only outliers
because of their obscurity; their gender puts them even more
intriguingly on the margins (although, as more musicians/engineers
of all genders come to light, perhaps the well-meaning but slightly
fetishy edge to this strain of archive fever will die down a
little). The Reichian ideas about libidinal orgone energy that
Jelinek added to the mix could even be seen as a gentle dig at the
essentialist ideas of tactility, mysticism and sensuality that
often linger around descriptions of electronic music made by women.
Jelinek's take on sound and gender seemed sharp, funny and on
point, and if women’s roles in shaping electronic music are finally
coming into the light, what’s a little irony along the way? On the
flight over to Canada I'd been reading about science fiction writer
Alice Sheldon, whose stories published under the name James Tiptree Jr were praised for being “ineluctably
masculine”; electronic sound, like science fiction, offers a space
to play with identity, subvert stereotypes.

My misgivings start to take shape in the dark, hushed space of
the Monument-National theatre, where it is harder to ignore who is
turning the dials. On stage, Jelinek and Pekler manipulate tape
machines and oscillators. Their actions are projected on one half
of a screen above them, the rest of which plays out a slideshow of
Bogner ephemera: schematics and diagrams; linocuts of planets;
photographs of Bogner’s home-built orgone accumulator. And, of
course, photos of someone purporting to be the woman herself – at
home, at work, at play. High, delicate and disembodied voices echo
out from whimsically named ‘Sombrero Galaxies’ into the ornate
domed room, and Jelinek pitchshifts his own voice up to an
androgynous tone to narrate a text. The mixture of pure analogue
abstraction and the vocal-based ‘emotive register’ spoken of in the
sleevenotes to Sonne entices me to drift off into a fluid,
utopian post-gender future space, like the calm galaxies depicted
in Bogner’s planet prints; something it's easy to do when listening
to the records.

But in this three-dimensional setting, the physical facts keep
asserting themselves. At an electronic music festival whose
performers are for the most part male, the Ursula Bogner project
doesn’t feel so different from anything else on show. I find myself
asking, as a static image of Bogner hovers over the stage, whether
it's OK for male musicians to co-opt a history that isn't theirs.
Does Jelinek's ironic objectification of a woman who probably never
existed edge real women’s art even closer to the margins,
trivialise it for those of us who think rediscovering it is less a
subject for satire and more an urgent political project? Is the
endpoint of this playful exercise in gender-bending postmodernism
just a theatre full of people staring at a photo of a woman,
listening to music made by men? The sounds that come from this
configuration of Jelinek, Pekler and the hypothetical Ursula Bogner
are inviting, but their live presence alienates, leaves me thinking
that this collaboration is better left in the disembodied realm of
recording, where one isn't so easily reminded of the still-skewed
realities of who actually gets to make, perform and benefit from
music.

28|02|2012

A month ago a DJ set by
Hieroglyphic Being (aka Jamal Moss) set my world on fire. It was in
Berlin, at the CTM festival, and I can't stop going over it in my
head, rerunning the maths to find the multiplying factor. It was
the first time I'd seen Moss DJ. It started at 3am, following an
impeccable set of tessellated Techno by Kassem Mosse. But Jamal
Moss's set was a different beast entirely: loose, sloppy and
incredibly ugly in some parts, but always giddy, impatient and
unpredictable. It ran through pitched up and pitched down tracks,
and too many genres and styles to count on one hand. At one point
it got into a call and response dialogue between New York disco and
Krautrock. The mixing was at times slick, incredible (an air raid
siren threaded through three tracks, sewing them together). In
other places it was a dirty hack made with a blunt instrument.

The constantly changing pace sent me nuts, for Hieroglyphic
Being's disregard for the conventions of what constitutes 'good'
DJing. In fact the performance capsized all the cliches that have
built up around our idea of what makes a 'good' DJ set, ie that
good mixing is a smooth segue between two tracks; that a set should
move through styles in a gradual progression; that bpms shouldn't
ramp up, plummet and shoot up again in the space of three minutes.
Moss moved between sections full of sudden schizophrenic cuts from
one track to another, and passages where he would let one groove
run unmolested for almost ten minutes. Tracks were pulled after one
chorus, played backwards, rewound. They were sped up to 170 bpm,
then slammed up next to slow 80 bpm funk.

I laughed my way through it, half the time shaking my head in
disbelief, frowning, puzzled. Admittedly, it pushed my buttons,
that New York disco stuff always does. But it was done with such
confident swagger – with Moss resplendent in Battlefield
Earth leather chic – that it worked.

Some friends said they were finding it "very challenging". Why?
Because what was expected (even given Hieroglyphic Being's diverse
output) was not being adhered to. Descriptions of the mood in clubs
and on dancefloors often resort to religious analogies, and this
set required you to make a leap of faith, or find yourself at an
impasse with regard to the sheer iconoclasm of it. CDJs are frowned
on in some circles, but central to Moss's set was the way it
foregrounded the sound of these tools – the fake scratching sound
of the CDJs, the speed shifting (sometimes without pitch control),
and brutal use of the fader.

Whereas Kassem Mosse's set felt like a perfectly
calibrated clockwork model (not conventional, but certainly neat
and tidy), Hieroglyphic Being's was the boss-eyed Frankenstein's
monster you fall in love with precisely for his scars and club
foot.

14|02|2012

One of the central events at the CTM and
Transmediale festivals in Berlin just over a week ago was Manuel Göttsching with Joshua Light Show (whose line up
now interestingly includes Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters). The
show was introduced by three of the festival organisers. They asked
in tense tones that people not move around the seated venue, and
also that the audience resisted the urge to film the show on
smartphones, as the intention was to attempt to create an immersive
experience reminiscent of an original Joshua Light Show
performance.

This immediately created a rift between the festival organisers
and their audience, not because it was an unfair request, but
because CTM and Transmediale had three
cameras covering the event (one still photographer, one for the
live stream and a secondary video camera). Of these three, the LCD
displays of two were in the eyeline of around a third of the
audience.

Before I get started though, I'd like to add that this post is
not about the ubiquity of the smartphone at live shows, or the
proliferation of the amateur documentarist. That's a knee jerk
reaction I'm not remotely interested in. The truly uncomfortable
part of the show was when two thirds of the way through a member of
Joshua Light Show emerged from behind the projector screen onto the
stage.

Picture the scene, it's a small-ish, reasonably low stage, in a
sit down modern theatre. She's dressed in a black top and sequinned
skirt, but wearing a giant cream and metal headset of the sort
pilots wear, and is edging awkwardly further towards the spotlight,
glittering in the halo from the spotlight focused on Göttsching.
Her arms are outstretched, in them is a handheld video camera
pointing straight at Göttsching. She draws closer, until she's
obscuring the view of him, and circles slowly, like David
Attenborough around a rare tree frog.

Göttsching ignores the camera, but the audience doesn't. In
those few seconds the atmosphere in the whole room shifts, and
there's a tension in the room. A couple choose this moment for a
toilet/bar break. Others shift in their seats, whisper across to
one another. The spell is broken.

The images she films are then sent back to the team behind the
curtain, where they're altered and projected live, in glassy
fragments among psychedelic lights and swirling ink flows. The
effect is definitely not analogue, but it's also not what's making
me antsy. It's her presence as a recorder, not the digital nature
of that recording that's making me uncomfortable. I'm already
trying to ignore three cameras. This puts it up to four.

This is the first time that Göttsching and JLS have performed
together in Berlin, and the show has been two years in the
planning. There's a large portion of the audience that wants to
film the show and stick it on YouTube, or just people who want to
get a photo with their smartphones, because this is an Event.
Joshua Light Show, for those 15-20 minutes, are the ultimate
spectator, in a crass display of how our modern recording habits
disengage us and can ruin an atmosphere.

The filming also brought up another more philosophical issue,
about the cultural currency of AV performance. It's often the case
that even with reasonably 'big name' visuals, the musical aspect of
a performance is the seller, and those creating visuals are
subordinated on the bill. This can usually be explained by the
bigger audience for music, and hence, the bigger name gets higher
on the bill. But on these terms Göttsching and Joshua Light Show is
a rare performance – a conjunction between an audio and a visual
arts festival, with Göttsching and Joshua Light Show equal on the
bill. In coming out from behind the screen Joshua Light Show are
asserting their right to be on the stage (even if it didn't work,
it was a legitimate part of the performance). It's uncomfortable.
Joshua Light Show clearly feel they have the right to be out in
front of Göttsching, but the reaction of the audience suggests
otherwise.

What Joshua light Show are doing feels inappropriate because at
an AV show, the V part of the equation is not allowed to mess with
the music. The performer is centre stage, and the visuals are an
accompaniment. But visuals can make or break a show (they
definitely elevated Roly Porter's performance earlier on in the
festival), but they're often treated with mild suspicion, as if
really arresting visuals are some sort of distraction, or a bogus
enhancer of the music. After Roly Porter, friends commented on the
fact that they weren't sure if they enjoyed it, because they were
worried they'd been sucked into the visuals and weren't able to
asses the performance properly.

In Berlin this week that gap was boldly pointed out to me, and
the fact that the digital processes jarred with the aim of the show
only added to the discomfort. The way we experience music live is
all about sight as well as sound. Great music is not diluted by
visuals, and visuals do not cover up for part-baked audio. The two
should work together. It's just a shame that The Joshua Light show
misjudged their front of stage intrusion at CTM.

(Despite the requests, one audience member did manage to film
sections of the show. Watch a section below.)

05|07|2011

At this year’s Mutek, the series of A/V
performances (as well as Amon Tobin’s bombastic stage spectacle)
were notable for treating visuals with an extra gravity that isn’t
often extended to VJs and A/V artists. Across the festival
schedule, visuals were brought to the fore and rendered in pin
sharp graphics.

Here's a clip of Purform, whose set was most collaborative, with
the audio visual elements merged into a coherent package, where
neither medium is the prime mover. It's this duo that got me to
thinking about the effect of hi res visuals on the audio in an A/V
show. Here, the monochromatic visuals were rendered across a three
screen array.

The effect of these super hi-res visuals is a sort of
synthesthetic illusion, whereby the audio is exaggerated because of
the visuals. There's a phenomenon like this in consumer technology:
people watching a higher resolution screen think that they are
hearing better quality audio than those watching a lower resolution
screen, even when the audio is identical. The same phenomena seemed
to be happening in the context of the A/V shows too, particularly
at Amon Tobin.

Tobin's stage set up was one of the centre pieces of the
festival: 3D projection mapping onto a stage set constructed from
giant white stacked cubes. The visuals run the gamut from abstract
lights and animated graphics to Transformer-like robots and
enormous spaceships in starry skies. The extravagance of this
spectacle appeared to give the booming of the bass an extra
dimension, and at the very least the sound for Tobin was noticeably
better than for other artists in the same venue.

The AntiVJ/Murcof collaboration benefited from a similar
synesthetic illusion: flexing, angular, monochrome noodles,
designed to react according to the frequencies Murcof was pushing,
stretched their vibrating coils into the foreground of the broad
screen, gave the bass an extra dimension, feeling like it got
deeper into my head. It reminded me of the the Lustmord show at
Unsound Festival in Krakow last year (also performed at Unsound New
York), where curling smoke trails spiralled into blackness.

Whether the brain's mixing up of good sound and
good visuals is a real effect in A/V performances or not, generally
speaking visual artists at Mutek were treated as legitimate acts
alongside their musical collaborators. This doesn't happen often -
one reason suggested to me has been that great audio visual shows
are suspicious: the more paranoid among us immediately ask what the
visuals are distracting us from in the music, like the card trick
that distracts you from the fact you've had your wallet nicked. Are
the bright lights just a diversion from what's going on somewhere
else in our senses, or are we just too used to music being
performed with little or nothing in the way of visuals to be
comfortable with it being done really well?

01|07|2010

Ah, Sonar. We love your beautiful home city of
Barcelona – full of gorgeous people, delicious food and sunshine.
We love the excellence of your stages' sound systems and the way
you refute the notion that the clubbing/raving experience is
necessarily depraved and dirty. We relish your stellar organisation
and helpful, civilised staff. And even though – after 17 years of
programming – there are now many hours of bland beats blanketing a
few acts of interest, we still love to go to Sonar.

Ah, Hyperdub. We were surprised that your party was off-Sonar,
but frankly all of the parties surrounding Sonar, not officially
included with Sonar, are part of what make it such a great festival
to go to. If you don't like the main course, you can fill up on
appetisers and desserts and this party was one of the best things
on the menu, even for tired old Londoners like ourselves. We were a
little overwhelmed by the enormous crowd at your small venue and
felt a bit bemused at how 'fashionable' it all was (has Hyperdub
become style-mag fodder?). Unfortunately, not even the improved
sound (yes, the same place as LuckyMe's party a couple years back)
and your great line-up could keep us there when we can see you lot
at home, with 50% less wankers and more room to dance.

Ah, Phill Niblock. We admire your history and were grateful that
there was a nod to experimentalism on the bill, somewhere. But
what, exactly, was special about this collaboration with Carlos
Casas? There seemed little connection between his films and your
music and frankly your own films would have served even better.

Ah, aging, reformed, once-popular band. This year you were Roxy
Music and actually, we quite enjoyed it – although we were slightly
disturbed at how lecherous Bryan Ferry looks, and how young suave
becomes middle-aged cheese now that you're all so old. You musn't
TRY to be sexy, you either are (like David Bowie) or you aren't.
Maybe you should go for dignified instead. Despite that, you played
as though you meant it, which we appreciated. However, sorry, no
way did you top Dizzee Rascal, who has surprisingly retained his
sense of self after spending so much time as a pop star. We can't
remember hearing Grime at Sonar before this year, but he actually
performed it and it didn't clear the (incomprehensibly large) room.
In fact, we saw lots of non-English types enjoying it and dancing
to it. But Dizzee, really, even if you have seized the energy of
hiphop, must you use those tired old call-and-response tropes? When
you exhort us like that, it perversely makes us NOT want to make
noise.

Ah, laptop DJs. Please, can you remember that if you EVER get to
play a large stage in front of thousands of people with a quality
soundsystem (say, at a festival like Sonar?), you should make sure
tunes are loaded at utmost bitrate quality? Otherwise, yr shit
comes through flat and fuzzy with zero dynamic. FlyLo, we're
looking in your direction! And really, you've played Sonar before,
so you should know better.

Ah, Alexander Nut. We loved that you warmed up the crowd with
Grime before Fatima came on. And dear, dear Fatima. We are actually
quite fond of you. We like how you channel black American soul
without artifice, although we think that you need to gain a stone
and possibly tap into the blues to get more resonance in your
wonderful voice. We hope that a producer we like more will make a
good track for you! Now, we can't forget Moodymann. You provided us
with the most spirited dancing, festival energy of the entire
weekend. We love how you have the EQ skills of Theo Parrish, but
keep it locked onto the party vibe and how you (like Theo) can make
tracks sound completely different. You make us feel that Detroit
must be a soulful place full of people who are sensually alive, and
not the desolate shell that Julien Temple and others would have us
believe (honestly, 8 Mile offers a more convincing portrait of the
city).

Ah, Herbert. We just found your set bemusing. We didn't think
you really went anywhere and we never figured out the point of your
silly ladder or your goofy tent. We also think you heard a
different set than we did, because your levels were very off and
constantly changing, but we're also sure that it was your own fault
and not the soundperson's.

Yes, sweet Sonar, we must say adieu for another
year. Please, next year can you offer more experimental music (it
might encourage music lovers to come again!) and bring back Jeff
Mills? We know he's played every year for yoinks, but as a festival
resident he is much cooler than Richie Hawtin.

06|05|2010

The folks at Soul Jazz Records have organised a
night at Cafe Oto to celebrate the life and work of the late
drummer Steve Reid, who over the course of his long career worked
with a wide array of artists including Miles Davis, Ornette
Coleman, James Brown, Fela Kuti and Sun Ra . Details on the flyer
below.